We spent this week test driving the car, adjusting springs, tire pressures, etc. We also started the last phase of engineering for the car--the body mounting. We designed all the tools to CNC bend the body tubes. We also started the CAD drawings so we could create files to CNC bend the tubes.
There are only 4 things left to do now.
make the body tubes
mount the body
polish the body
install the interior.
That sounds like not much, but it is actually very time consuming and difficult to engineer the body mounting and to get it all set up properly.
Here are some pics of the tooling we made this week for the body tubes.
The steel we make the tooling from is very expensive and they don't make it in plates. So, we have to take big round bars and cut them into cookies the size we need to make the parts out of. We then weld bars to the side of the cookie so we can get the cookie away from the chuck jaws of the machine. If you are too close to the chuck jaws, you don't have enough room to make the part without the machine running into itself.
I forgot to take a picture of the tool we made, but I will take some pics tomorrow. We are machine almost everything in 4 axis so we can spin the part all the way around. That way we can machine the top and the bottom of the part all in one operation and then cut the part out. We invented a very special way of cutting parts out so they can be machined all in one set up. Every time the operator touches the part, they introduce the chance of screwing something up. This way we don't let the operator touch the part. We call it fixtureless machining because we don't need a fixture to make extremely accurate parts.
This is the CNC tube bender we made tooling for this week.
